Common Spanish Nouns

In the Spanish language, the name of anything that refers to people or is a name of particular things is called a noun. The noun has several qualities and is very much Unlike English, Spanish nouns contain genders, which means they are either considered masculine ( el ) or feminine ( la ) or neutral, there is also a uncertain gender that is written as (el mar). Therefore, words that are nouns have to have a particular gender in general, this helps in the proper representation of the sentence and the prefix is thus applied suitably.

The noun function

The noun functions are:

1. Nucleus of the sentence is what we are writing per se, for example we have: La casa es de color amarilla which in English means the house is yellow, what has to be noted is that the house is considered feminine in Spanish; the sentence has a nucleus around which the whole sentence is written.

Let us look at some of the other examples that state the importance of the noun nucleus and noun function.

1. We can write a work as a nucleus of a predicate without a proper verb, for example we have: “Casa vieja, problema seguro” which in English means “Old house, sure problem”.

Articles and nouns

Nouns in Spanish more often than not require either a specific article or an imprecise article, but it requires an article nevertheless, some of them are el, la, los, las & lo or un, una, unos, unas, let us look at some of the examples of how these are used:

La casa means the house
Una casa means a house

In the above example we have casa as the noun and la is the definite article, in the second phrase we have casa as the noun and una is an indefinite article. This way we have to actually use an indefinite or a definite article with a noun in a Spanish sentence.

Noun gender

The word Vostoros is used in the Spanish language when speaking to more than a single person at a time, with the clause being that you know the group of people with whom you are having the conversation with. This plays an important role to anyone trying to use Spanish at their workplace. This one too has both female and masculine variant, therefore, care has to be taken while trying to address a group with the knowledge that the words to be used are different depending on the gender of the people listening to you. Nostras or vosotras is used when referring to a group of females, sometimes ellas is also used. Ustedes is normally used as a non gender based way of referring to a group of people; this is usually practiced in most of the Spanish speaking countries and is critical in business meeting and employee briefings. Uds is also used in many of the Latin American countries and Mexico.

Numbers / Ordinals

All the nouns in Spanish have a gender; this can be masculine, feminine or be neutral in nature. There are some nouns that have an uncertain gender, for this we use el mar, la mar, other nouns might have both genders but will undergo a change of meaning while linking one and the other, for example we have el cura which means “the priest” I English, we can write a totally different sentence hat means quite something else like la cura meaning “the cure” in English.

There are nouns that do not modify the gender and there are other nouns where the article makes all the difference of the gender.

Pluralizing nouns in Spanish

In Spanish almost any noun or an adjective can be pluralized. We can do this by the following three methods

Noun possessive form

The possessive form of a noun such as "Danny’s house" does not exist in the Spanish vocabulary, so the way to articulate the possessive noun form is as given below:

"The house of Danny” which can be written in Spanish as “la casa de Danny”.

To pluralize the noun form, you can just pluralize the possessed noun into:

"Las casas de Danny”, now this becomes a plural.

Derived nouns in Spanish

The derived nouns could be formulated and written in form that is derived from the primitive word or the root word of the phrase. We can do this by changing the root word in to its corresponding noun form; this is mostly not used in normal Spanish vocabulary and is therefore ignored by many new learners of the Spanish language.